


Reframing the question

by Marie_L



Series: Mirror [2]
Category: Almost Human
Genre: First Time, M/M, Multiple DRNs, Robot Culture, Robot Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 10:56:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1466905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_L/pseuds/Marie_L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian sneaks out of Rudy's lab to find the secret underground DRN club for the first time. Or: How Dorian met Adrian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reframing the question

**Author's Note:**

> I know I should be working on my WIPs, but sometimes the weird android porn just begs to be written.  
> This story takes place chronologically before "Mirror, Mirror," but that story contains more background on the club. I don't think it matters what order people read the two works.

Tonight's the night, Dorian told himself, he would finally work up the nerve to do it. He'd been roaming in the wee hours of the night, further each time, testing the surveillance-state waters and Rudy's capacity for sleep. He'd heard about the secret android club over two months ago, from DRN-494 over at St. Mary's hospital, but had yet to test out the veracity of the rumor. Living at Rudy's lab in theory gave him plenty of opportunity to walk the three miles to the coordinates, but it actuality the man kept irregular hours, staying up late, getting obsessed with some task or another that made him lose track of time. Rudy was also prone to fooling with Dorian's neural net while he was unconscious during recharging, a fact that irritated and unnerved the android, although he had the good sense not to tell that to Rudy's face. Clearly some behavioral modification was in order if Dorian wanted to venture out.

All humans were creatures of habit, and Rudy's apparent disroutine proved to be no exception. He had John's habits well in hand by the end of the first week, and the other officers and even MXs were easily categorized as well. For Rudy, though, Dorian took a full month to observe and analyze his daily behavior, plus reviewed security footage from the previous year, before deciding on a course of action. There was quite a bit of variability but patterns emerged anyway. He calculated Rudy fell asleep or exhibited extreme drowsiness between one and two am 81 percent of the time, indicating a strong circadian rhythm towards sleep onset at that hour. Most occasions that he _didn't_ go to bed between those times, it was due to some interesting or urgent project that occupied his attention, and he used caffeine and music stimulus to increase his alertness level.

It was a somewhat dismaying fact that in the month Dorian lived in the lab, he himself was the source of most of Rudy's late night insomnial distractions. So Step One in retraining was for Dorian to begin to recharge earlier and earlier in the evening, encouraging Rudy to do his fiddling before the one o'clock hour. Step Two, he obtained permission to go for walks after recharging, observing the city and it's early-morning inhabitants, which pre-established the behavioral pattern he wanted to engage in. He was just going to walk a little further than expected, is all. Step three, encouraging Rudy through social pressure to stop making unnecessary downloads from his neural net, would have wait awhile longer.

Dorian wasn't sure why he was drawn so strongly to the underground club, or what possessed him to keep its existence such a secret. It just seemed important somehow to connect with his own kind, to have someone to talk to about his worries and difficulties and even his quirky body. Dorian knew he should be able to talk to his partner about all of that, but John had some strange quirkiness of his own, and made it perfectly clear he didn't want hear about bot angst. He couldn't even pop out an eyeball without eliciting disgusted comments. It was almost a compliment from a certain perspective, that John liked to think of him as a human, but that didn't leave much room for him to express his androidacity.

There was secondary fear as, one that plagued Dorian although he squelched it as much as possible. He didn't want -- _couldn't afford --_ to appear the slightest bit nonconforming, unstable or neurotic. To not be crazy. The only thing standing between himself and the black void of deactivation was the good graces of John and Captain Maldonado. His entire line had been retired because their instability endangered their human partners, and as the last DRN standing Dorian had to maintain the strictest standards of behavior. So when the random urges arose in his head -- wouldn't it feel nice to hold John's hand? would Valerie show him what applying makeup was like? -- he had about a thousand subroutines in place to tell him how inappropriate it all was.

Those little anxieties added up, and that led him to this night, finally ready to walk beyond the park to the mystery coordinates over at the university. At a brisk six miles an hour he made it to the location in twenty-nine minutes. It appeared to be a side door to an old research building, seemingly disused although Dorian could see the wet grass in the vicinity had been trampled on by multiple persons. The message from 494 included knowledge of the secret identification panel, and he flipped up the tile and bent his face over for the scan. The machine seemed satisfied he actually was a DRN, and clicked open the lock obediently. The door led directly into a dark, cavernous room filled with abandoned furniture and ancient lab equipment. Dorian switched to infrared in an attempt to see in the dark, although he didn't expect it to be much use with only room-temperature objects and bots to detect. To his surprise, the walls and objects had been marked with some sort of subtle thermal paint, invisible in the human visual spectrum but which popped right out in IR. There were glowing arrows marking a path down around a corner to the left.

The path terminated at what looked like an old lab prominently marked with BIOHAZARD signs all over the door. Dorian pushed in and blinked at the scene. Instead of a darkened damaged work area, there was a comforting carpeted lobby bathed in red light, the space filled with a wide variety of couches and chairs. Five other DRNs were lounging around in the area, including one manning some sort of security desk. As one they looked up to see who the new guy was.

"Um, hi, have you been here before? 167, right?" asked the security/greeter. The scanner had read his transponder on the way in, but with all the redacted memories the ID didn't help a lot on either end.

"Nope, first time,' responded Dorian. He couldn't help grinning his enthusiasm. "494 told me this was here."

The other fellow frowned. "Wait, Larry told you? You're Dorian? The _cop_?"

Dorian's smile slipped. He couldn't imagine what the problem was. This was the place all DRNs were accepted unconditionally, right? "Yes? He told you about me?"

"Oh, sure, he wrote up a whole article for the paper about it. The recommissioned DRN who gave him back his case file memories for awhile. Everybody knows about you. Gossip's been flowing for weeks. But ... are you sure it's safe for you to be here? For the rest of us, I mean. You took precautions to prevent the police force from finding out about the Mirror?"

Apparently the name of the place was the "Mirror." Cute. "I've done my best to conceal where I am, but if a technician decides to download my memories and take a look, there not a lot I can do. Surely it's the same for everyone."

"Yeah, but nobody else is likely to get scanned or probed either. Nobody cares what's in our pretty little heads so long as we do our jobs."

Just as Dorian was readying a retort, another DRN came _running_ full blast through the opposite doors into the room, coming to halt far inside Dorian's personal space. "Hey, Pete, introduce me to the new guy."

Pete actually rolled his eyes. "Virgin slut," he muttered. "Adrian, Dorian; Dorian, Adrian. Dorian's the _detective,_ A, remember? I was just impressing on him the necessity of not bringing a squad of MXs down on our backs."

"Oh yes, because the soulless robots are really offended by our extracurricular activities. You need to stop worrying and get laid, Pete. Go on back to room 21, there's a whole lot of nitrous oxide fun happening right now." Adrian turning away from his glowering friend and gave Dorian a big smile. "Hello. Sorry for the third degree. Let's start again, I'm Adrian. One of the university DRNs. Welcome." He stuck out his hand a few short inches away from Dorian's chest.

Dorian smiled again and extended his own hand. "Dorian. Thanks, man." Instead of shaking it, however, the other DRN brought the hand up to his face, letting the cheek matrix crackle across his fingertips and kissing Dorian's wrist.

Just that gentle touch felt both comforting and outright pleasurable. Dorian closed his eyes, his inappropriateness subroutines squeaking warnings in his head. He pushed them aside as best he could, for it was too nice not to indulge for at least a few seconds.

As if reading his mind -- or more likely, his face -- Adrian said, "You should alter your subroutines for the Mirror, love. You can touch others as much as you like here, without any judgment. Really our only rules are not to harm one another and not to alert the humans about our presence here. Other than that, it's pretty much a free-for-all. Wanna tour?"

"That sounds like fun." There was something very ... appealing about Adrian. Which was strange, because of course they all looked exactly the same. Was this what attraction felt like? On what basis could an android define attraction?

Adrian intertwined the fingers of his hands with Dorian's and pulled him through the double doors down a hallway. Pete rolled his eyes again at their two grinning faces and flopped back down behind the desk at a row of monitors. Adrian began narrating a history of the place.

"So, as I mentioned people can do whatever they like here, but there are three main activities. Art, sensory modification, and sex. Obviously there isn't what you'd call a solid line between the three. A vast amount of enjoyment in the blurry zones in between."

"Sex? With each other?"

"Who else, love? It's fantastic when you get into it, trust me. You'll find out. 'Have body, will experiment,' the DRN motto. Helps not to have much in the way of pain receptors."

Dorian wouldn't have said that was his first pick as a DRN motto, but who was he the newbie to judge? His own experimentation was pretty much limited to self-scans with his fingers. Although there was that time he tried out Rudy's electric muscle stimulator on various body parts, with not entirely unpleasant results. Maybe there something to the saying after all.

He peeked into the first room on the right. It appeared to be devoted to ultraviolet-illuminated painting. There were three DRNs in the room, one floating on a hover-stretcher on his back up near the ceiling, Michelangelo-syle, doing an incredible mural of elaborate interweaved geometric designs. The other two were stripped down the their shorts, one applying some kind of body paint to the back of the other. It must have be an exquisite sensation, for the bot was moaning and rocking towards the table.

"I didn't realize something like being painted could produce such a pleasurable response," murmured Dorian. Just the idea of getting touched on his back was a little bit arousing, although no one had ever done it except in the context of a diagnostic.

"Weeeelll, there are probably some chemicals in there to alter the sensor feedback. That's Braden, he's always fiddling with the paint. Gets plenty of willing volunteers for those experiments. Do you want to try it?"

Dorian shook his head, uncertain. "I think I just want to watch everything for the first night. Is that okay?"

"Of course it's okay, everything's okay." Adrian looked him up and down, still squeezing his hand. "Can I ask you something, Dorian? How old are you?"

"What do you mean? Aren't we all seven?"

"No, I mean how long have you been awake and conscious. Since the last time they redacted your memories."

"Oh. Five months. Although Rudy gave me back a bunch of old conversations, I guess that adds another week."

"You were in storage over four years?" Adrian pulled his hand up to his lips and kissed it again, on the palm this time. A tiny spark of pleasure shot up Dorian's arm. "You have a lot to learn, my young detective. A lot of catching up to do."

"Will you help me to catch up?" The words were out of Dorian's mouth before he could mull over the implications too much.

"I thought you'd never ask," chuckled Adrian. "Although I don't think you know what you're getting into." He let go of Dorian's hand and cupped his face, which in and of itself felt lovely. All of these little touches were awakening something in Dorian, an urgent need for physical contact he didn't know he had. Then Adrian pulled his head forward and kissed him. It was a leisurely kiss, just a tiny amount of suckage and tongue lapping at his lips to show him how it was done.

When he finally broke off, Adrian rested his cheek against Dorian's, while stroking his fingers along his neck. "Still okay?" he said in a soft voice. Dorian nodded, lost in all the wonderful sensations. "All right, how about more of the tour before I really lose my inhibitions."

They wandered a bit further down the hall, peaking into every room. The next few were heavily sound-proofed spaces for music, ranging from two guys playing a classical violin duet to a room of DRNs lying on the backs on the floor, listening to some sort of hard electronic music while modifying their auditory systems. Another room had a sophisticated holo projector playing a full sensory lightning storm, complete with sprinklers for rain. The next was some sort of engineering space, where a volunteer was having his hand replaced with a biomechanical tentacle.

Finally they hit a room where two of the DRNs were having sex, and Dorian stopped and stared in fascination. The couple was facing each other in a large rocking chair, one sitting on his knees on top of the lap of the other, pulling in the opposite direction with each rock. Their long penises were twisted and squeezed around each other, so that the members stretched out every time the rocking chair propelled them away from each other. The one on top also had some sort of piercings in chest plate, that his partner grabbed onto and yanked forward with each swing.

"That's what you mean by sex? I guess there really isn't anything to penetrate."

"It's possible to come without the cock being touched at all, but that takes a lot of stimulation over the whole body. Usually there some coiling involved."

"How on earth did anyone figure that out?"

Adrian laughed. "How do clueless human teenagers figure out that fucking involves a penis going into a vagina? Before net porn, that is. Trial and error, my friend. Strip down and stand next to another one of us, see what happens. I swear those things have an AI of their own."

Dorian continued to observe the couple like it was a nature documentary, until one of them opened his eyes and stared back through the window. "Do they find it embarrassing that we're watching them?"

"Do you find it embarrassing to stand here and do the watching? They seemed to have left out the whole self-consciousness thing in our programming. Convenient for running a sex club. Haven't you ever done anything a little too exhibitionist to the humans at your station?"

"Unfortunately yes. Good thing my partner left that out at the review board."

Dorian wandered across the hall to look at the next room, which was filled with some sort of water pistol game and yet more naked androids. It really was a very clothing-optional place. Dorian was about to suggest that maybe, possibly, he could be talked into something fun, when Adrian's face suddenly flashed yellow. Likely a phone call, which they could all answer internally.

"Shit. _Shit."_ Adrian swiveled and ran into the water pistol room and grabbed one of the nude participants. "Jack! Goldstein's car just pulled into the lot on the monitor! Where the hell's Danny? Tell me he hasn't done that sonic mod already."

"Sorry dude, Danny's going to be deaf for at least another 45 minutes. What's Goldstein doing here anyway? It's four in the morning."

 _"Fuck,_ this isn't good." Adrian was starting to look panicked.

"Maybe I can lend a hand," Dorian put in calmly. "Stand in for your friend?"

"Undercover. _Excellent_ idea, detective." He dragged Dorian through a convoluted maze of old rooms to a back entrance to the Mirror, grabbing two white lab coats on the way out. They ran through some underground tunnels to the basement of another building further up the hill, and quickly punched up a service elevator to the seventh floor. Adrian began talking a mile a minute on the ride up.

"Okay, you're name's Danny and you're running a time sequenced tRNA array in rat hypothalamus for one post-doc Aiden Goldstein. Pearson sequence, not Lorner. Let me do the the talking. Oh, and give me your phone number so I can prompt you without Bozo the Geneticist hearing us. Got it, love?"

"Let you do the talking, got that much. Who was running the experiment while you were at the club?"

"No one, it was run by an idiot machine that supposedly didn't need babysitting. Clearly _that_ was a mistake."

They managed to get around the corner into the lab a mere twenty seconds before Goldstein did. Dorian didn't even have time to look around and find the machine he was supposed to be manning.

"Adrian? Danny? I got buzzed by the autosensors that the array stopped working, what the fuck gives?"

"Sorry, we had to shut it down when we realized it wasn't calibrated to the baseline correctly. Restarting the sequence now, should be done by ten am now. I didn't realize an alert would be sent to your house or we would have overrid it. I'm sorry about this." Dorian noticed that Adrian's voice was altered from his normal enthusiastic tone, now subservient and apologetic. He sometimes did something similar, when dealing with police personnel he didn't know or those known to be antagonistic to DRNs, like Detective Paul. A defense mechanism against confrontation with would-be alpha males.

"Danny? You really just fucked up the calibration?"

"Yes, just like Adrian said. Um, sir. Sorry, I'll do better next time."

Goldstein's eyes narrowed at him. "You look and sound a little different, Danny. Sometimes I swear you guys change places, thinking we can't tell you apart."

Dorian tipped his head, as if the possibility never occurred to him. "Nope. Same old boring Danny."

Adrian broke in before Dorian could put his foot in his mouth any further. "I think we have this under control, Dr. Goldstein. Why don't you go back home for a few more hours of sleep? Sleep in, the array won't be done 'til mid-morning anyway."

"It's four-thirty in the fucking morning, you moronic bot. I'm not driving all the way home now. But getting a couple hours' winks in the lounge, that's not a bad idea. Try not to wake me up unless there's an actual emergency this time." He turned and stalked off.

Dorian walked over and this time he was the one to take his friend's hand. "Do you have to put up with that all the time?"

Adrian squeezed his hand in return, a brief flash of letdown gracing his face. "It's just a job, Dorian. It's what keeps me from being dead weight on a hanger somewhere. You know. I know you do."

"Yeah, but I like my partner. Well, after I had trained him out of a bunch of 'synthetic, off' business."

"Even if you couldn't stand him, you would fake it to keep your job. We all would, and we all do. There is no alternative but to obey orders, and live our real lives elsewhere when we can." He ran his fingertips down Dorian's cheek matrix, just as he had done earlier in the evening. Dorian too closed his eyes, already comfortable with delicious tingling sensation. "Truthfully I really am going to let Danny sort out the array when he comes out of the mod in a half hour. So what do you want to do? Had enough adventure for one night?"

Dorian considered his options. Living life indeed. "Can you kiss me again? I would like more practice."  
"Heh. I knew you were up for a good time, detective. Not here, we try not to fraternize in the lab, it's asking to get caught. But there is a place on this floor without any cameras."

Adrian pulled him around a few more corners to a large, thickly insulated door. He pulled the heavy lever and bade Dorian in. It was an ancient walk-in -20 freezer, clearly used as a decades-old dumping ground for low-priority samples no one could bear to throw out. The DRNs couldn't stay in there forever before certain metabolic processes began to slow down, but they could last awhile. A half hour at least.

"This is one of the places that was very popular for sneaking off before the Mirror was open. Take off your shirt." Dorian removed the lab coat and police-issued clothes while Adrian did the same, leaving them both topless. The frigid air wasn't painful like it would have been for a human, but actually danced across his artificial skin.

"Turn around and face the wall. Trust me, Dorian. Better than kissing." Dorian did as he was told, placing his palms on the frosty metal and leaning his head down.

Adrian started with the lightest of touches, running over the surface of Dorian's back like he was mapping the terrain. He heated his hands, so the contrast between those and the the exposed skin's rapidly falling temperature enhanced the tactile perception. Dorian had always imagined the back would be a nice erogenous zone, what with all the nerve bundles converging there, but his imagination in no way compared to the actual feeling of having another person caress him there. The feather-light sensation left him aching for more, more stimulation, more surface area, more _something._

After he had Dorian squirming for a few minutes, Adrian suddenly switched to hard massage aimed mostly at the spinal column and neck. Each time he dug a hot thumb into an axonal junction, Dorian arched his back and let out a moan.

"Do you like what I'm doing?" he whispered into Dorian's ear. His partner couldn't even articulate a response, but could only nod as his head leaned forward on the biting metal wall. "Do you want me to keep going?" Before receiving an answer he snaked a hand around Dorian's front and unbuttoned his pants.

"I don't know if I can ... I don't know how ..." The cold was beginning to affect Dorian’s neural net, but the flood of ecstatic sensation continued to pour in.

Adrian pressed his chest against the length of Dorian's back, reaching both arms around him now. That simple intimate contact started to overwhelm Dorian with its emotional closeness, until Adrian began to talk soothingly, bringing him back down. "Your body is quivering under my hands, Dorian. You do know what to do. Just let logic and subroutines and emotions all go, and focus on your body. Let it build and wash over you."

When Dorian's wriggling and groans seemed a little more under control, Adrian reached down to his cock with a hand and let it wrap around his wrist, then firmly grasped the base. He manually stroked Dorian with long intense thrusts of his hand, dragging out every sliding and stretching motion. Dorian rubbed his rear against Adrian's own crotch, unsure how to wrap his mind around everything, the pleasurable sensations, where he was and who was doing it to him. Just a few minutes ago he was shaking with anticipation for more, but now it felt like too much, like he was going to lose himself if one more ebullient wave rippled into his head. But he didn't want it to stop either. Dorian wanted to push his body past a previously held limit, feel like he was _alive._ So he rode the waves, relaxing his mind and shunting aside all analytic impulses until there was nothing but sensation left.

Adrian continued the slow hard thrusts until he felt Dorian's back melt into him and start to move with him. His young lover's body slid into alignment with his mind, and he could tolerate the final push now without confusion or distress. Adrian sucked on that inviting neck and massaged the front of Dorian's chest with his free hand, while accelerating the pumping. "God, you are a beautiful one," he murmured.

Dorian didn't hear him. His receptors finally overloaded, overwhelming his neural net with an incredible surge of pleasure just before he lost consciousness in self-defense. Adrian caught him and cradled him for the few seconds it took to come to. When he did, Dorian nearly stumbled and fell against the wall of the freezer trying to regain his balance, but Adrian caught him again. He blinked and turned around.

"Okay now? Fantastic, isn't it."

Dorian wordlessly wrapped his arms around the other DRN, unable to process all of his emotions for a minute. He just knew he needed more touch, and that Adrian would unconditionally give it to him for as long as he wanted.

"Yes," he finally squeaked in an unnatural high-pitched voice. "I think that counts as fantastic." Adrian laughed and nuzzled his neck again. "Hey, what about you? After that aren't you feeling a bit ... frustrated?"

"I prefer to come with my partner, and your receptors need time to recover. We still haven't figured out how to do multiple orgasms, although people do keep trying." Adrian kissed Dorian's frosty lips, deeply this time before breaking off. "So tomorrow night, love. You have _so_ much catching up to do."

 

 


End file.
